It’s still so early the day hasn’t had a chance to heat up. I’ve made it to the courthouse just in time, and now I sit, watching the caretakers out the window sweep the narrow paths and wet grass with short twig brooms. It must be hell on their backs. It’s the last day of the tribunal, and nothing’s happening yet, though everyone is seated and waiting.
Thank goodness D’Andrea isn’t here; I don’t think I could have faced him after our telephone call less than an hour ago. Yet I already feel less animosity toward him now I’ve erased the tape. Maybe I’ve forgiven him. I don’t know. I settle back in my seat, look around. There’s a different mood in the court today: expectant, watchful, almost an exhilaration running beneath the formality of cheap dark suits and carefully impassive faces.
Since coming to Beirut it’s as if my life in Boston has receded, reduced to its essentials. Leaden skies. Raindrops on camellias, sagging petals crammed against the window of Sarkis’s apartment – I still can’t call it mine – the cold hands of a stranger on my bare back at night. I miss no one in particular, though I long for some human contact. Long to fill up my emptiness with somebody, anybody. Not D’Andrea. Not with second-hand memories of this place. Not my non-existent scenarios of who my father really was. Last night before I fell asleep I roiled in that terrible, familiar well of loneliness, and a jazz melody was playing on the clock radio by the bed – but it wasn’t jazz any longer; it had changed into that eerie Armenian lullaby and there was a man there that wasn’t really there, a man like my father with dark straight brows and a smile that could make me melt.
In a chilling moment, I’m struck by the sense that I’m merely existing here in Lebanon, only going through the motions to finish off something that began eighty years ago. And then what? I remember Minas talking – an animated skull swathed in sheets to the chin – from the heights of an iron-barred bed. Was he already in hospital then or was it the bedroom on the top floor of the Beirut house? He was sick, dying. I must have been too young to understand the import of his statement because I continued playing with my dolls, moving them back and forth over the mounds and hillocks of his blanket, chattering under my breath. Yet what I did understand was the anger and shame in his voice as he began to whisper, ‘Come, child, come closer, over here.’
I climbed onto the bed, conscious of his old man’s smell and the dandruff flaking his narrow shoulders. He told me about a terrible place he was sent to when he was only a little boy. That’s what had made him such a horrible grandpa, and I must forgive him. I nodded, pulling at my lower lip. He told me about gritty sand and heat haze as far as the eye could see, tents that bent and cracked like dry skin in red winds that came from the south, wailing that rose and fell like a descant day and night, until he couldn’t discern whether it was women crying or his dead mother calling him, but it was a sound he couldn’t – even now – escape. At that moment, I hated the people who had done this to him.
Once in Boston, I didn’t have the time to wonder whether I hated – no, distrusted – Turks. But it was the first time I’d met any: petite girls with black hair like mine, skin as dark, eyes, gestures, songs, food, jokes – like mine. But I never became friends with them. I’ve grown up with the sounds of bombs in my sleep, I whispered as I traversed silent, empty classrooms. I’ve dreamed through explosions. You wouldn’t understand. I’m immune to loss. Warring factions live inside me, tribes at odds with one another, armed to the teeth. I felt so sorry for myself it’s almost laughable now.
Do I still feel sorry for myself? My grandmother became the slave of a Turk. My grandfather was incarcerated in a death camp: seven months of hell in the desert. How did he survive? My father – what exactly happened to my father? Somehow, the horror of his death fails to touch me today. I’m okay. I’m still okay. Here I sit, fed, clean, rested. I can smell the faint rosemary residue of my shampoo when I move my head, the fine soap I brought all the way here from Boston on the tips of my fingers. My pressed, crisply washed clothes folded artfully as origami before I put them on. The maids at the hotel so quick, I barely have time to give them my dirty linen before it’s been washed and dried on the rooftop terrace.
My daily routines in these few weeks have become immutable; exercise at dawn, morning glasses of tea at the Cafe de Paris; the beginnings of those articles for The Globe that grow bristly with more questions. My marathon walks coming close, then closer to our old house in the Armenian quarter, yet never quite reaching its sacred, sinister arcs; exhaustion and sleep in the late afternoon; gin-soaked midnight conversations with journalists who spend more time at the Mayflower than on the ground. Each night, I lose myself in the intimacy of panelled bars and other peoples’ stories, in the harsh, glittery edges alcohol brings. Each day, I come closer to the core of my history, the blackness.
The two UN judges come in, sit down. It’s all so sudden, I don’t feel as if I have time to take it in. The verdict: charges dismissed against Ariel Sharon, although Israel is shown to bear ‘indirect responsibility’ for the massacres. The biggest villains are the Lebanese Phalange militia, with special mention made of Elie Hobeika and Selim Pakradounian. No reparations to the families of the victims. Just an official apology made by the Lebanese government and Israel under the auspices of the UN. It makes me so ashamed I want to hide my face. I sit paralysed in my seat and all around me groups of Palestinian families stand, cry, hug: children, women, holding flowers from their gardens, their faces awash with conflicting emotions. I see the old woman and the little girl again. They stand apart from the others, then the woman takes the girl’s hand in a slow gesture of resignation as they shuffle out to the street.
I raise my sleeve to hide my face. I know my father was a war criminal. I’ve always known it. But all along, I’d hoped that someone else would come along – someone from the past, someone with authority, and tell me I was wrong. As I wipe my eyes, I capture the indefinable smell of my childhood on summer mornings, when Siran would begin the day’s chores just after dawn. A day exactly like today: dew still on the ground and moisture dripping from the thick-veined petals of bougainvillaea. My father’s absence a continued knife-thrust, a sharp pebble in my throat. Streets stretching out into the distance, already flared white in a hot wind. Washing powder from a huge round tin and early sunshine, smooth as milk. Lilit in the kitchen making breakfast, hobbling out to the garden on her cane to tend our flowers. The scent of lime-blossom tea that hung, faintly cloying, in her withered hands and hair. It’s here I sit, on my hard slippery seat in the courthouse, and begin to accept where I’ve come from – a place where everybody was a victim, or a perpetrator. Or both at the same time. I came here, wanting to make sense of it, and found D’Andrea instead. He was so desperate that night, beside himself. I know he didn’t want to scare me, or hurt me. Nevertheless, he did. But I’m glad now that I erased the tape, because I’ll do anything – everything – not to be like any of them, not to be a victim again.